Monday, February 28, 2005

Rugby

Well, Ireland won, and it was a grand game, very exciting. But even I feel that the referee was hard on England. It'll be interesting to see what the papers say this morning.

Knitting

I've heard from my sister, from London. She and her husband (and my alpaca yarn) are safely in London, on their way to southern Africa, except for the yarn. Roger is most helpfully setting up a wireless network for my daughter's household which has, for the moment, cut them off from the outside world entirely. I want to ask Rachel to ask her stylish 18-year-old daughter Helen to have a look at the Chapotis pattern and tell me what she thinks. I've got enough yarn in a Cheery Tree Hill merino-and-silk DK and am itching to get started. Perhaps I'll just knit it and then see who wants it. The colorway is rather bright: peacock, in fact. Not me, I feel.

Here's the Fair Isle jacket:

Distinct progress

I'm rather pleased with it. The shoulders are grafted. I decided, after re-reading both Starmore and Meg, to do the sleeves top-down. Starmore suggests having a good look after an inch or so, to see whether one has picked up the right number of stitches. Is it flaring outwards? or, alternatively, puckering? It might even be worth threading stitches onto waste yarn and having a real look. I think I've got it right -- there are 74 rounds of pattern above the armhole. I've picked up 70 stitches each way, up and down. Fair Isle stitches are much closer to being squares (=row gauge same as stitch gauge) than plain st st, because the colors pull the stitches in. But not quite.

The other thing I did on my free afternoon on Friday was to re-block the wretched ribwarmer. I think I've got it now, although I'll hit it with the steam iron this morning. My shape leaves a lot to be desire, viewed dispassionately in a full-length mirror.